Toilets. Lies. And a shovel…
[image credit: Canva AI]
My mother signed me up for the Brownies when I was seven years old. I admit, I was mildly enthusiastic until I realized two things:
- The only meeting snacks on offer consisted of stale graham crackers, so the name “Brownies” was one of those blatant lies grown adults told little kids (like “candied” sweet potatoes or “sweetbreads”. And don’t even get me started on Rocky Mountain Oysters…)
- The list of things each Brownie needed to pack for our upcoming camping trip included a small shovel. We were standing in the middle of the woods before the head brownie broke the news regarding that shovel’s purpose. Not only did that mark the end to my brownie career, but it also led to my lifelong vow not to take any vacations where I had to dig or put on shoes to use the loo.
As I grew, this vow was occasionally challenged. In Spain, the toilets in our renovated mill house flushed beautifully as long as you primed them with a bucket of water from the nearby pool. In India, my friend Jaya proposed knocking on doors of complete strangers and demanding they let me use their toilets. (She ended up checking me into a wonderful little charity hospital instead.) On a small plane in Virginia, another woman and I held up our coats to shield a pregnant passenger who wasn’t going to make it to arrival in Blacksburg. Stranded in the Denver airport with two toddlers and an infant during a blizzard one Christmas, I made it through two days with only a Sears Roebuck Christmas Toys catalog as toilet paper and a pack of extra absorbent period pads as diapers.
Then, this summer, I finally went to Greece. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Greece, one of the cradles of western civilization. They defined thousands of years of art, music, literature, and food. Greece boasts fantastically beautiful scenery, weather, and gyros. How is it even remotely possible that I’ve been to Gary, Indiana (often, actually) but never to Greece?
To be honest, I’d probably still be Greece-less, except for the boat.
You may recall my failed attempt to interest the Hub in retirement (known as the R-Word around casa Taub). We bought a pretty little boat and proceeded to terrify the dog and introduce unsuspecting fellow sailors to my suddenly salty vocabulary. Clearly, emergency sailing school was needed. And there were several very reputable options here in the UK. But…
The Glove of Shame.
Have you ever heard something referred to ONE TIME and suddenly you hear it everywhere? A friend mentioned learning to sail in Greece. Within microseconds every online link held an ad for sailing schools on Greek islands. Random strangers discussed it on the bus, in line at the grocery store, and in the ladies room on the ferry from the mainland.
Not one of them mentioned the toilets.
So there we were, two people who between us have successfully operated a toilet several tens of thousands of times, standing on the dock in Corfu next to a 40-foot yacht and a man introducing himself as Captain Ron. He shook our hands. He glanced at the boat. He did not mention winches, tides, or the points of a compass. Instead, he cleared his throat in the manner of a man about to deliver difficult news to the next of kin.
“Before we talk about anything else,” he said, “we need to talk about the head.”
I have a Ph.D.-adjacent level of expertise in euphemisms for “toilet,” acquired over decades of travel and motherhood, so I nodded gravely, the way you nod when a doctor says “we need to talk about your labs.”
“You pump it to flush it,” Captain Ron continued. “Ten pumps, minimum. And you never, under any circumstances, flush toilet paper. Not on this boat. Not anywhere in Greece. The pipes cannot take it. There is a bin. The bin is your friend now.”
The Hub and I exchanged a look that contained over 140 combined years of muscle memory, all of it aimed directly at a lever we would now have to un-learn.
“And if the habits of a lifetime get the better of you,” Captain Ron said, in the tone of a man who has clearly said this sentence before and watched it not work, “you’ll be issued the Glove.”
“The glove,” I repeated, the way you repeat a word in a language you don’t speak, hoping it will translate itself if you just say it slowly enough.
“The Glove of Shame,” he said, and I want it noted for the record that you could hear the capital letters. “You’ll wear it. You’ll use it. You’ll fix what you did. There’s no one else on a 40-foot boat to fix it for you.”
Reader, I would like to tell you that six-plus decades of toilet-related travel wisdom — the buckets, the shovel, the catalog, the charity hospital — had prepared me for this moment. That I, of all people, would rise magnificently to the occasion.
I did not.
I made it two days before muscle memory won. I will spare you the specifics except to say that the Glove of Shame is real, it is bright yellow, and it now lives rent-free in my memory the way certain scenes from childbirth do — vivid, unwanted, and apparently permanent.
We never did master tacking. Our knots remain, generously, decorative. But I have crossed a threshold no Brownie badge ever prepared me for: I can now pump a marine head ten times without flinching, without complaint, and without a single lever-based flashback.
Somewhere in the Ionian Sea, Captain Ron is still delivering that same speech to some other unsuspecting couple, Glove of Shame at the ready. And somewhere in a drawer back home, mine sits neatly folded, retired but not forgotten — the only souvenir from Greece I never once considered leaving behind.
Some people bring home olive oil. I brought home a glove and a personal relationship with a bilge pump. Frankly, I think I got the better deal.
The Greek Flush: NO Toilet Paper [Image credit: Canva AI]
Barb Taub 